It appears that the safeguards did not really work since more than 700,000 apps were removed from Google Play past year.

The number of removed apps speaks to the increasing number of attempts by developers to sneak harmful app onto your phone, but also to Google's efforts in using machine learning and other techniques to find these apps before they ever appear in the store.

The apps were removed because they "violated the Google Play policies", these violations included apps deemed to be Copycats - apps that masquerade as another, apps containing "Inappropriate content" that includes "pornography, extreme violence, hate, and illegal activities", and apps that contain Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs), which can "conduct SMS fraud, act as trojans, or phishing user's information". When you look at 2016, there was about a 70 percent increase in the apps removed between 2016 and 2017. Google claims that many of its Files Go users use SD cards to back up their files. "Tens of thousands of apps with inappropriate content were taken down past year as a result of such improved detection methods". Even though Google Play Protect is good at catching a lot of these malicious apps, sometimes they still get through.

Tell us in the comments what you think of all of this news. Lastly, a new "Open With" flow lets users choose the app that they want a file to be opened with.

Google is quite aware that it can't detect every single malicious app before it hits the store, though. Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and action against them earlier. Over the years, this commitment has made Google Play a more trusted and safer place.

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